Maximo Sedano had no doubt that Rall was a killer. He didn’t know anything about the man except what he had said, but he knew Alejo Vargas. Vargas was just the man to order a killing, or to do it himself. The list of Castro’s enemies who had disappeared through the years was long enough to convince anyone that Vargas’s enmity was not good for one’s health.
Maximo could hear footsteps behind him as he walked through the train station.
A few students looked up at him, glanced behind him at whoever was following … .
That had to be Rall.
What if it were someone else? What if Rall were not alone?
If there were two men, he was doomed. He was betting everything that there was only one man, one man who thought him an incompetent coward.
Well, he was a coward. He had never had to live by his wits, face physical danger. He was frightened and no doubt it showed. He was perspiring freely, his temples pounding, his breath coming in short, quick gasps.
He entered a long, dingy hallway, following the signs toward the men’s room. The hall was empty.
He could hear the footsteps coming behind, a steady pace, not rushed. The man behind was making no attempt to walk softly. He was confident, in complete control, the exact opposite of the way Maximo Sedano felt.
He fought the urge to run, to look over his shoulder to see precisely who was back there following him.
Time seemed to move ever so slowly. He was aware of everything, the noise, the people, the dirty floor and faded paint, and the smell of stale urine and feces wafting through the door of the men’s room as he entered.
No one in the room. The stalls, empty.
Maximo walked to the back wall, turned, and faced the door. He kept his hand in his pocket. He grasped the butt of the pistol tightly, his finger wrapped around the trigger.
Rail walked into the room, stopped facing him.
“Well, well. We meet again.”
Maximo said nothing: He swallowed three or four times.
“Are you going somewhere on the train? Am I delaying your departure?”
Maximo bit his tongue.
“What do you have in your pocket, little man?”
He tilted the barrel of the pistol up, so that it made a bulge in his trousers.
Rail grinned. The naked bulb on the ceiling put the lower half of his face in shadow and made his grin look like a death’s-head grimace.
The German reached into his jacket and pulled out his pistol. He leveled it at Maximo.
“If you are going to shoot me, little man, go ahead and do it.”
Sweat stung Maximo’s eyes. He shook his head to clear the sweat.
Rail advanced several paces, moving slowly.
“Take your hand out of your pocket.”
Now the German leveled his pistol. Pointed it right at Maximo’s face. “I will shoot you with great pleasure unless you do as I say.”
“Everyone will hear,” Maximo squeaked, and withdrew his hand from his pocket. Automatically he raised both hands to shoulder height.
Rail kept advancing. When he passed under the lightbulb his eye sockets became dark shadows and Maximo couldn’t see where he was looking.
Rall came up to him, slapped him with his left hand, then felt Maximo’s right trouser pocket. At this distance Maximo could see Rall’s eyes. His hands were together above his head.
“A gun!” the German said with a hint of surprise in his voice.
He reached for it, put his left hand into Maximo’s pocket to draw it out.
As he did so he glanced downward.
With his right hand Maximo pulled the handle of the ice pick loose from the strap of his wristwatch and drew it out of his sleeve. With one smooth, quick, savage swinging motion he jabbed the pick into the side of Rall’s head clear up to the handle.
Rall collapsed on the floor. Maximo kept his grip on the handle of the ice pick, so the shiny round blade slipped out of the tiny wound, which was about an inch above Rall’s left ear.
Maximo bent down, retrieved his pistol. Rall’s pistol was still in his hand, held loosely by his flaccid fingers.
There was almost no blood on the side of Rall’s head.
Rall tried to focus his eyes. His body straightened somewhat; one hand tightened on the pistol in an uncontrolled reflex, then relaxed.
The German groaned. Muscle spasms racked his body.
Maximo took a deep breath and exhaled explosively. He wiped at the perspiration dripping from his face. His shirt was a sodden mess. Squaring his shoulders, he walked out of the men’s room without another glance at the man sprawled on the floor. As he walked down the hallway toward the main waiting room he passed two male students carrying backpacks, but he purposefully avoided eye contact and they didn’t seem to pay him any attention.
He walked at a steady, sedate pace through the terminal and out into the night.
CHAPTER NINE
William Henry Chance sat in the back of the van listening to the tape of Vargas’s conversation with his generals. Normally the fidelity of this system was acceptable. Every now and then a word or phrase was garbled or inaudible, the same drawback that affected every listening technology. People mumbled or talked at the same time or turned their heads the wrong way or talked while smoking. Still, this evening he was only catching occasional words.
Chance strained his ears. Phrases, occasionally a plain word, lots of garbled noise …
“Is this the best we can do?”
“The sky was overcast, the window was in shadow with the evening coming on.”
“What about the laser?”
If the crystals were illuminated with a laser beam in the nonvisible portion of the spectrum, the vibrations could be read with the large magnification spotting scope at the usual distance. The problem was getting the laser close enough to the crystals. Maximum range for the laser was less than one hundred meters, so the van with the laser had to be parked literally in front of the building.
“We didn’t want to take the risk without your permission.”
Ah, yes, risk. This equipment had been brought into Cuba by boat. The four technicians—of Mexican or Cuban descent—had arrived the same way.
Miguelito was from south Texas, the son of migrant laborers. He didn’t learn English until he was in his late teens. He had recorded the conversations, listened to the audio as the computer processed it. “What did you think, Miguelito?” Chance asked. Chance’s Spanish was excellent, the result of months of intense training, but he would never have a native speaker’s ear for the language.
Miguelito took his time answering. “It is difficult to say. I hear phrases, pieces of sentences, stray words … and my mind puts it all together into something that may not have been there when they said it. You understand?”
Chance nodded.
“What I hear is a conversation about biological weapons in Guantanamo Bay.”
“You mean using biological weapons against Guantánamo Bay?”
“That is possible. But my impression was that the weapons were already there.”
“Castro. Did they talk about Castro?”
“His name was mentioned. It is distinctive. I think I heard it.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I do not know.” Miguelito looked apologetic.
“Biological weapons inside the U.S. facility is impossible. They must be intending to use them against the people there.”
Miguelito said nothing.
“I’d better listen,” Chance said.
“I will play for you the best part,” Miguelito said. “Give me a few moments.” He played with the equipment. After about a minute he announced he was ready with a nod of his head. Chance and Carmellini donned headsets.
Noise. They heard noise, occasionally garbled voices, but mostly computer-generated noise as the machine tried without success to make sense of the flickering light coming through the high-magnification spotting scope. Every now and then a word or two in Spanish. “Gu
antánamo … attack …” Once Chance was sure he heard the word “biological,” but even then, he wasn’t certain.
Finally he removed his headset.
Miguelito did likewise.
“Perhaps they are talking about possible targets when and if,” Carmellini suggested. “After all, they can spray this stuff into the air from a truck upwind and kill everyone on the base.”
Chance grimaced. What he had here was absolutely nothing. He was going to need something more definite before he started talking to Washington via the satellite.
“They did a lot of talking about political matters, people and districts, whom they supported and so on,” Miguelito said. “It is not much better than what you have just heard—they talked of this before the sun went down—but I got the impression that Vargas wanted Delgado and Alba to abandon any commitments they had to Raúl Castro or the Sedanos and throw in with him.”
“Hmmm,” said William Henry Chance. He tried to focus on Miguelito’s comments and couldn’t. Biological weapons were on his mind.
He recalled Vargas’s face, remembered how he had looked as Chance had sat there discussing a Cuban-American cigarette company. The strong, fleshy face had been a mask, revealing nothing of its owner’s thoughts. That poker face … that was his dominant impression of Vargas.
The man certainly had a reputation: he was ruthless efficiency incarnate, a thug who smashed heads and sliced throats and got answers from people who didn’t want to talk. Every dictatorship needed a few sociopaths in high places. He was also subtle and smooth when that was required. Nor had he yet surrendered to his appetites, surrendered to the absolute corruption that absolute power inevitably causes. Not yet, anyway.
Yes, Alejo Vargas was a damned dangerous man, one who apparently possessed the brains and managerial skills necessary to produce biological weapons and the brutality to use them.
El Gato may have shipped the Cubans material that they could use to culture bacteria or viruses, but as yet there was no hard evidence that the Cubans had done so.
That tantalizing word, “biological.” Why would the interior minister and the head of the Cuban Army and Navy use that word if they weren’t talking about weapons? Sure as hell they weren’t talking about barracks sanitation or the condition of the mess halls.
If there was a biological weapons program, Chance told himself, the evidence would be inside the ministry, the headquarters of the secret police. There must be paper, records, orders, letters—something! No one could run a serious project like that without paper, not even Vargas.
The evidence is inside that building, he told himself.
After Fidel died of poison she had handed him, Mercedes was locked in her bedroom by Vargas and Santana. Which was just as well.
She pulled a blanket over herself and curled up on the bed in the fetal position. The silence and afternoon gloom were comforting.
Amazingly, no tears came. Fidel had been dying for months, she was relieved that he had finally come to the end of the journey, the end of the pain.
In the stillness she listened to the sound of her breathing, the sound of her heart pumping blood through her ears, listened to an insect buzzing somewhere, listened to the distant muted thump of footfalls and doors closing, people engaged in the endless business of living.
She saw a gecko, high on the wall, quite motionless except for his sides, which moved in and out, just enough to be seen in the dim light coming in through the window drapes. He seemed to be watching her. More likely he was waiting for a fly, as he did somewhere every day, as his ancestors had done since the dawn of time, as his progeny would do until the sun flamed up and burned the earth to a cinder. Then, they say, the sun would burn out altogether and the earth, if it still existed, would wander the universe forever, a cold, lifeless rock, spinning aimlessly. Until then geckos clung to walls and God provided flies. Amazing how that worked.
She wondered about Hector, wondered if he would be found and arrested, or murdered and shoveled into an anonymous grave. God knows she had done everything possible to warn him. Perhaps the man didn’t want to be warned: perhaps he knew the task before him was impossible. Perhaps he really believed all that Jesuit bullshit and in truth didn’t care if he lived or died. Most likely that was it.
The truth was that the more you knew of life, of the compromises one must make to get from day to day, the more you realized the futility of it all. None of it meant anything.
Man lived, man died, governments rose and fell, justice was done or denied, venality was crushed or triumphant; in the long run none of it mattered a damn. The world spun on around the sun, life continued to be lived … .
When we perish from human memories we are no more. We are well and truly gone, as if we had never been.
She threw aside the cover and sat up in bed, hugging her knees. She thought again of Fidel, and finally let him go. She then had only the twilight, the room falling into darkness.
Toad Tarkington was waiting for Jake Grafton beside the V-22 Osprey on the flight deck of United States.
The Osprey was a unique airplane, with a turbo-prop engine mounted on the end of each wing. Just now the pilot had the engines tilted straight up so that the 38-foot props on each engine would function as helicopter rotor blades. The machine could lift off vertically like a helicopter or make a short, running takeoff. Once airborne the pilot would gradually transition to forward flight by tilting the engines down into a horizontal position. Then the giant props would function as conventional propellers, though very large ones. The machine could also land vertically or run on to a short landing area. A cross between a large twin-rotor helicopter and a turbo-prop transport, the extraordinarily versatile Osprey had enormous lifting ability and 250-knot cruise speed, capabilities exceeding those of any conventional helicopter.
Jake Grafton stood looking at the plane for a few seconds as it sat on the flight deck. With its engines mounted on the very ends of its wings—a position dictated by the size of the rotor blades—the machine could not stay airborne if one of the rotor transmissions failed. It could fly on one engine, however, if the drive shaft linking the good engine to the transmission of the distant rotor blade remained intact.
The Osprey’s extremely complicated systems were made even more so by the requirement that the wings and rotors fold into a tight package so that the plane could be stored aboard ship. The transitions between hovering and wing-borne flight were only possible because computers assisted the pilots in flying the plane. Complex controls, complex systems—Jake thought the machine a flying tribute to the ingenuity of the human species.
The evening looked gorgeous. The sky was clearing, visibility decent. The late afternoon sun shone on a breezy, tumbling sea. Jake took a deep breath and climbed into the plane.
He put on a regular headset so that he could talk to the flight crew.
“’Lo, Admiral.”
“Hello, Rita. How are you?”
“Ready to rock and roll, sir. Let me know when you’re strapped in.”
“I’m ready.” Jake settled back and watched Toad and the crewman strap in.
Lightly loaded, the Osprey almost leaped from the flight deck into the stiff sea wind, which was coming straight down the deck. Rita wasted no time rotating the engines forward to a horizontal position; the craft accelerated quickly as the giant rotors became propellers and the wings took the craft’s weight.
An hour later Rita Moravia landed the Osprey vertically on a pier at Guantánamo between two light poles. The sun was down by then and the area was lit by flood lights.
A marine lieutenant colonel stood waiting. He had the usual close-cropped hair, a deep tan, the requisite square jaw, and he looked as if he spent several hours a day lifting weights.
As they walked toward him Toad muttered, just loud enough for Jake to hear, “Another refugee from the Mr. Universe contest. If you can’t make it in bodybuilding, there’s always the marines.”
“Can it, Toad.”
The lieutenant colonel saluted smartly. “I am deploying a company around the warehouse, Admiral. We’re taking up positions now.”
“Excellent,” Jake Grafton said. “I brought an aerial photo that was taken this afternoon”—Toad took it from a folder and passed it over—“if you would show me where you are placing your people?”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Eckhardt, the landing team commander, used the photo and a finger to show where he would put his company. He finished with the comment, “My plan is to channel any intruders into these two open areas formed by these streets, then kill them there.”
“What are your alternatives?”
They discussed them, and the fact that Eckhardt planned to divide one platoon between several empty warehouses and use them as reserves. “I think this will be a very realistic exercise, sir,” the colonel finished. “I have even had ammunition issued to the men, although of course they have been instructed to keep their weapons empty.”
“Colonel Eckhardt, this is not an exercise.”
“Sir?”
“That warehouse, warehouse nine, contains CBW warheads. They are being loaded aboard this freighter and the one that left the other day for transport back to the states, where they are supposed to be destroyed. The first ship that left carrying the damned things has disappeared. We’re hunting for it now. I don’t know just what in hell is going on, so I’m putting your outfit here just in case.”
“What is the threat, sir?”
“I don’t know.”
Jake could see Eckhardt was working hard to keep his face under control.
“If the Cubans or anybody else comes over, under, around, or through the perimeter fence, start shooting.”
“Yes, sir,” Eckhardt said.
“Have your people load their weapons, Colonel. They will defend themselves and this building. No warning shots—shoot to kill.”
“If we are assaulted, sir, how much warning would you expect us to have?”
“I don’t know. Maybe days, maybe hours, maybe no warning at all.”
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